"Well, that was a decadent one percenter orgy of pilfered wealth": Scenes From Last Night's White House Correspondents' Dinner Pre-Parties

Last night I fought with a flack about one of my stories, had a slightly awkward conversation with an actor I really admire (Richard Kind from A Serious Man, who says he is working on "a lot of plays") and walked directly into an ottoman.

The tally so far: The New Yorker party, the Atlantic party, the Google/Hollywood Reporter party. It’s the following morning, and both of my index toes are still totally numb from my terrible shoes. Not at all bad, but definitely a weird night.

The New Yorker had the best party real estate in town, the rooftop bar of the W Hotel, which was penned in to keep everyone from freezing to death. There were lots of tree branches and bird cages hanging from the ceiling, lobster tails and chicken and waffles on the menu, and waitresses coming around to top your glass off with Cristal. I don’t remember seeing many celebrities—I recognized Carla from Top Chef and the singer from OK Go, and apparently Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein were wandering around—but I did recognize lots of political types: Rand Paul (weird venue for an anti-establishment guy, right?), Kathleen Sebelius, Amy Klobuchar, and former Congressman Tom Perriello, who was snapping photos with a bunch of ladies who clearly made him feel like a boss. I interviewed the DJs, Andrew Andrew, at length, which seemed like a good idea at the time. "We’re from the future, we’ve been sent back in time to set things right. I think the most appropriate metaphor would be your Marty McFly from the ’Back to the Future’ series...’" one of them told me. Then, somebody brought around espresso ice cream scoops in mini chocolate cones. They were a revelation.

David Carr was there, and he said something I wish I had written down, but couldn’t because a woman’s dress purse is far too small for such valuable things as a pen, but it perfectly captured the strange swirl of nausea and excitement that characterizes most Washingtonians’ feelings about these affairs. I can approximate pretty closely. He said, Yeah, I don’t really have a reason to be here. But I wanted to be here, so... and then he was cut off by someone introducing him to some VIP I didn’t recognize. Fair enough. Later, he tweeted messages to his 360,000 plus followers that appeared to be meant for text.

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